I Had a Disastrous Experience With a Home Inspection. Here's What Happened

When I purchased a property a while back, I had a home inspection. I made my offer to buy the house contingent on the outcome of that inspection. That's because I didn't want to get a mortgage and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a home only to find out there were unexpected problems with it.

Unfortunately, the inspection did not work out as planned and I ended up having a costly issue that I had to tap into my savings account to cover. Here's what happened.

My inspector made a big mistake

When I got my home inspection done, there was a small crack in the swimming pool on the property. The inspector, and a subsequent pool inspector that we hired, indicated it was a surface crack. The pool would need some relatively minor repairs, which were estimated to cost around $1,000 or less. 

The inspector gave us a written opinion showing that the damage was pretty minor and we ended up deciding to move forward with the home purchase without asking the sellers to do the repairs or make any concessions to us, like giving us any additional money off the price of the home.

We relied on the inspectors' assessments when we moved forward, and we didn't want to ask the home sellers to do anything because it had been hard to get a deal in the first place -- and we didn't want them to do a shoddy fix when we figured we could move in and spend the little bit of money needed to get things working correctly. 

Unfortunately, when we actually hired a swimming pool repair company and they began looking at what needed to be done, they found that the crack that had been dismissed as minor was clearly indicative of a bigger problem with the pool. Not only would we need to resurface the pool, but we would need to bring in extra concrete to rebuild and stabilize that section.

The price would actually be a lot closer to $15,000 than the $1,000 the inspector had told us we should expect to spend. And a second pool repair company confirmed there was a pretty major problem, so we weren't just getting scammed by the initial repair people. The inspector, including the specialized pool inspector, had made a big mistake. What's more, the pool repair companies agreed that they should have known the issue was a bigger one based on the nature and location of the crack in the pool. 

My recourse was very limited despite the home inspector's error 

Naturally, we were furious to find ourselves facing a huge problem after moving in when we had specifically hired an inspector to ensure this did not happen. But, when we went back to the inspector, they told us to read the fine print -- which clearly indicated they were only responsible for losses up to the amount we had paid for the inspection.

In other words, we could get back the $300 we had paid them for the inspection -- if we sued -- but our contract prevented us from getting any more, despite the fact that we were out a lot of money.

Unfortunately, there was basically nothing we could do and we had to bite the bullet and pay the cash out of our pockets. Ever since then, though, I haven't had a whole lot of trust in home inspectors and always try to get repair quotes first -- or ask for sellers to fix issues -- before I finalize a home purchase.